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Lending pools are decentralized applications which allow mutually untrusted users to lend and borrow crypto-assets. These applications feature complex, highly parametric incentive mechanisms to equilibrate the loan market. This complexity…
Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) are blockchain-based organizations that facilitate decentralized governance. Today, DAOs not only hold billions of dollars in their treasury but also govern many of the most popular…
Traditional blockchain untraceability schemes, such as mixers and privacy coins, obscure the sender-receiver relationship by placing transfers within an anonymity set. This paper studies a stronger goal: whether the transfer event itself…
Decentralized Finance (DeFi) is a prominent application of smart contracts, representing a novel financial paradigm in contrast to centralized finance. While DeFi applications are rapidly emerging on mainstream blockchain platforms, their…
Scam contracts on Ethereum have rapidly evolved alongside the rise of DeFi and NFT ecosystems, utilizing increasingly complex code obfuscation techniques to avoid early detection. This paper systematically investigates how obfuscation…
Yield farming represents an immensely popular asset management activity in decentralized finance (DeFi). It involves supplying, borrowing, or staking crypto assets to earn an income in forms of transaction fees, interest, or participation…
Block-chain world is very dynamic and there is need for strong governance and underlying technology architecture to be robust to face challenges. This paper considers Ethereum, a leading block chain. We deep dive into the nature of this…
To non-experts, the traditional Centralized Finance (CeFi) ecosystem may seem obscure, because users are typically not aware of the underlying rules or agreements of financial assets and products. Decentralized Finance (DeFi), however, is…
Recently emerging Decentralized Finance (DeFi) takes the promise of cryptocurrencies a step further, leveraging their decentralized networks to transform traditional financial products into trustless and transparent protocols that run…
We identify the slow liquidity drain (SLID) scam, an insidious and highly profitable threat to decentralized finance (DeFi), posing a large-scale, persistent, and growing risk to the ecosystem. Unlike traditional scams such as rug pulls or…
We identify a subtle security issue that impacts the design of smart contracts, because agents may themselves deploy smart contracts (side contracts). Typically, equilibria of games are analyzed in vitro, under the assumption that players…
The Ethereum blockchain platform supports the execution of decentralised applications or smart contracts. These typically hold and transfer digital currency to other parties on the platform; however, they have been subject to numerous…
Transaction fee mechanism design is a new decentralized mechanism design problem where users bid for space on the blockchain. Several recent works showed that the transaction fee mechanism design fundamentally departs from classical…
Bitcoin mining presents a significant economic incentive for efficient hashing and broadcast of data, both parameters stemming from the Proofs of Work used to advance the network. This incentive has led to the development of Bitcoin…
Decentralized finance (DeFi) lacks centralized oversight, often resulting in heightened volatility. In contrast, centralized finance (CeFi) offers a more stable environment with institutional safeguards. Institutional backing can play a…
Several attacks have been proposed against Proof-of-Work blockchains, which may increase the attacker's share of mining rewards (e.g., selfish mining, block withholding). A further impact of such attacks, which has not been considered in…
Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) refers to a wide class of economic attacks to public blockchains, where adversaries with the power to reorder, drop or insert transactions in a block can "extract" value from smart contracts. Empirical…
The advent of smart contracts has enabled the rapid rise of Decentralized Finance (DeFi) on the Ethereum blockchain, offering substantial rewards in financial innovation and inclusivity. This growth, however, is accompanied by significant…
Mining processes of Bitcoin and similar cryptocurrencies are currently incentivized with voluntary transaction fees and fixed block rewards which will halve gradually to zero. In the setting where optional and arbitrary transaction fee…
The Ponzi scheme, an old-fashioned fraud, is now popular on the Ethereum blockchain, causing considerable financial losses to many crypto investors. A few Ponzi detection methods have been proposed in the literature, most of which detect a…